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Abroad at Home; When Truth Is Treason

Despite all the gains for democracy in the world, in many countries anyone who wants to publish truths unwelcome to the government risks suppression and criminal punishment. If Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon had had their way, that would be so in the United States, too.

On June 13, 1971, 30 years ago next Wednesday, The New York Times began publishing a series on the secret official history of the Vietnam War that became known as the Pentagon Papers. That afternoon President Nixon spoke on the telephone with Dr. Kissinger, his national security adviser. The conversation has now been declassified, and published by the National Security Archive.

The First Amendment and other legal doctrines, the court said, protect the right to publish even these highly classified documents -- unless, as Justice Potter Stewart put it, publication would ''surely result in direct, immediate and irreparable damage to our nation or its people.'' The government had not made that showing.

So it was judges who saved this country from the repressive spirit that prevails in so many others. The Pentagon Papers case stands today as a barrier to silence by official edict.

But there is another meaning in the Pentagon Papers episode. It was caught in an exchange between President Nixon and Dr. Kissinger later in that same June 13 conversation.

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''My God,'' the president said, ''can you imagine The New York Times doing a thing like this 10 years ago?'' Dr. Kissinger replied, ''And then, when [Senator Joseph] McCarthy accused them of treason, they were screaming bloody murder.''

Mr. Nixon was right. Ten years earlier The Times was unlikely to have published such a volume of classified documents on a national security matter. What had changed? That was the question Mr. Nixon did not ask, and did not understand.

What changed the attitude of The Times and other mainstream publications was the experience of the Vietnam War. In the old days in Washington the press respected the confidence of officials because it respected their superior knowledge and good faith. But the war had shown that their knowledge was dim, and respect for their good faith had died with their false promises and lies.

Reporters and editors of The Times in the past had accepted the need for some secrecy. (James Reston, the great Times reporter and columnist, knew for years but did not write that we were flying U-2 spy planes over the Soviet Union.) Now they were all for publishing the Pentagon Papers. The decision was up to the publisher, Arthur O. Sulzberger, and it was not an easy one. He was a former U.S. marine with a deep concern for national security. But when we were fighting a dubious war by dubious means, where did that security lie? Mr. Sulzberger gave the go-ahead for publication.

This country is now firmly committed to freedom of expression on even the most sensitive subjects. So we believe. But it would be a great mistake to think that the Pentagon Papers case settled the issue forever on the side of freedom.

Just last year Congress passed a bill that would have made publication of any classified information a crime. The press paid little attention to the menacing legislation until it had gone through both House and Senate and been sent to the White House. President Clinton then saved the day by vetoing the bill.

Every generation has to relearn the lesson of the Pentagon Papers case. William B. Macomber, deputy under secretary of state at the time, testified for the government, saying that diplomatic disclosures might have ''irreparably damaged the chance of free government to endure.'' But years later he said:

''Even though . . . nothing is more important to me than the security of the United States, the First Amendment is, in another way, the security of the United States. You can't save something and take the heart out of it.''